It didn't fail at all. It made a ton of profit where MS was losing money.

The main reason it failed was because of the stigma it Nintendo had at the time of being, "kiddie". The Purple lunch box (which is what i heard a lot of people call it) wasnt an attractive looking system. The controller was viewed as not being as comfortable as the Xbox or PS2 controller. And for a most part Nintendo's big games were infioror to their Nintendo 64 counterparts.

- Mario Kart Double Dash
- Super Mario Sunshine (this game did NOT help nintendo's kiddie image)
- Zelda: The Wind Waker (another, kiddie image game)
- Mario Party Games
- Wave Race: Blue Storm
- Star Fox Adventures
- 1080 Avalanche
- Donkey Konga Games

Of course some of these games people loved, but most of those games were viewed as not as good and ground breaking as their N64 counterparts. The whole Kiddie image stigma Nintendo had at the time really hurt them in the long run. THis might have been why they bought Resident Evil exclusives at the time. For me personally Gamecube is only just above the the WiiU as Nintendo's worst systems.

With that said, GCN brought us...

- Resident Evil 4

- Metroid Prime 1+2

- SSBM

It was the format that games were produced on. It was hard to come. By and expensive for developers compared to ps2 and xbox which used standard dvds. Also it came far to late in the generation. By that point ps2 had already made sure it was the only dominating console of that gen
.

Two simple reasons, no DVD and launching a year after PS2. I believe had Nintendo gone with the use of DVD as the format and releasing the same year as PS2 it would have been on equal terms with PS2. And I agree that the color choice was pretty bad. They should have started with grey and white and then later in the console life they could have gone crazy with other colors.

It's true that the original Xbox never turned a steady profit, even with software sales and the like.

GameCube seemed to be barely profitable, or at least it didn't lose billions and billions of dollars. Saying it failed may be too strong of a word. But it sold well below Nintendo's expectations. They probably expected at least N64 lifetime sales, hopefully SNES lifetime sales or higher.

It's such a shame that even with a $99.99 price point in the states from early 2003 onward, the GameCube still didn't make much of a splash.

Obviously Nintendo's biggest failure of a home console critically and commercially is the Wii U. And their biggest platform flop ever was the Virtual Boy.

Back that time Nintendo home console market was essentially USA and Japan only. PS1 made console gaming popular worldwide and those markets were way more ready to buy a PS2 than a console from the company know for producing Game Boy

People overlook how much the lack of a brand affected Nintendo here. Wii was pretty much their first home console to sell a decent amount of copies in Europe, their old efforts didn't manage to sell even 8 million there
Elsewhere their best seller was N64 with not even a million copies sold

Meanwhile PS1 sold an outstanding 40 million copies outside North America and Japan. PS2 market was already 40 million potential consumers ahead of Nintendo, and devs knew that so why put their odds on Nintendo in first place ?

In Japan, GC did lack of appealing titles for console gamers (mostly RPGs) all on PS2 thanks for an awful relationship Nintendo build with third party developers during N64 era. JP support was cut down to favor GBA instead. Japan customers were happy playing their favorite Nintendo franchises on portables, this never changed until today and Japan is still growing more and more a handheld-heavy market

In USA Nintendo did quite well during N64 era, all droughts considerate, thanks to their very outstanding branding (same brand they never had in Europe), but by the end of N64 life it was clear Sony was giving a much better support so why get a Nintendo console again? Specially if that said console have nothing to stand out by itself, either on hardware or software side. XBOX entering in the market only help to dig the grave of Game Cube, as then even people who doesn't want a PS2 have no reason to buy a GameCube

You know, I see a lot of people saying it was because a lack of games, but Gamecube's library honestly looks a lot better from an outsider's perspective than the N64 library to me in terms of games I'd want to play, and maybe more so than/comparable to the Wii. It also had a pretty quick succession of games in it's first year in North America, from what I remember it was something like Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Luigi's Mansion, Metroid Prime, Sunshine, Monkey Ball 1+2, Smash Melee, Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil Remake, and a month after it's anniversary Windwaker. Sounds better than the Switch's first year to me honestly. But then again, that's an outsider's perspective.

Really, I think a big problem is that the N64's success was really reliant on western support, and a lot of western consumers went to the Xbox. I also think that the lack of DVDs meant people didn't use it as a DVD player, and a lot of cutscene or content heavy games were a better fit on Playstation 2, which was a double whammy. The fact that it's software lineup was heavily front-loaded probably doesn't help, either. That's really something that's been a consistent issue with Nintendo's post-SNES home consoles, and doesn't look to be an issue with something like the Switch. Sure there were games like Metroid Prime 2, Tales of Symphonia, and the heavy hitter: Mario Kart Double Dash. But most of it's acclaimed and massively successful games were out in the first year. It looking weird is probably the third or fourth biggest part, it's not exactly great for marketing, but consistently great content will keep people coming usually whether or not a console looks odd (and don't bring up the Wii U as a counterpoint to this, that was a downright dysfunctional system).

I think it was a few things.

First off Sony had completely taken over the popular consciousness of video games. Playstation was the thing to have and PS2 just dominated.

You also have Microsoft entering the field to further increase competition. While Xbox barely did better than Gamecube, it could boast the best graphics whereas without it GC would clearly have been the graphically superior system. Plus Halo and Halo 2 were huge games and helped make Xbox compete as the multiplayer system of choice with GC after N64 had been the dominant multiplayer system of choice.

Also it looked like a toy. I think certain people just didn't take it seriously because of the way it looked.

It also had weird button configuration on the controller that people just found too weird to play.

They also once again choice an inferior software format.

Plus third party support, while far better than N64, was still hurting from the exodus that happened on N64.

Also Mario Sunshine was received that well because it was different and Wind Waker wasn't received that well because it was different. So Nintendo's two most iconic franchises were, at the time, considered kinda off versions when they came out.

So while Microsoft came in and said hey look we've got online games and we're the most powerful system and we've got Halo, and Sony was continuing the juggernaut brand that started on PS1 and got the lion's share of third party games and GTA got insanely popular, Nintendo basically was like oh hey we have a small inexpensive system that looks like a toy with weird buttons, no online, we're finally using discs but they are smaller and more expensive, and we've got less third party games.

Gamecube was a great system with a great library, it was cheap and powerful, but I think it kinda lacked a marketing hook.

More than barely profitable. It made them good money. It just didn't sell as much as N64.

Here we are 20 years later and everyone's PS2 is a busted, broken, pile of shit, while I got 3 GameCubes and they all still work great :)

Just saying.